Monday, April 28, 2014

Reuters' columnist Anatole Kaletsky's take on Obama's promise to defend Japan militarily against China over Senkaku Islands (that's how it is understood in Japan) is that the US president created false expectation he has no intention of actually fulfilling.

I see. So indeed China is Russia, and Ukraine is Japan, as Reuters Japan's article compared the other day (see my post on April 24, 2014 for the quote from the article).

President Barack Obama’s trip to Asia this week has focused mostly on Japan’s territorial disputes with China. On this issue, Obama seems to be repeating the same mistakes he made in Ukraine.

By creating false expectations of U.S. support for the Japanese position, the president is encouraging Japan to escalate its belligerent rhetoric. That, in turn, makes Chinese military action to seize the disputed islands more likely. Everyone knows that there is no chance of the United States going to war with China to defend Japan’s claim to four uninhabited lumps of rock.

Luckily, a military confrontation in the East China Sea remains highly unlikely because the Beijing government’s top priority is economic and financial reform. Unfortunately, this seems less true of Japan.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s attention seems to have shifted from economics to diplomacy and military matters — and financial markets have started to notice this disturbing change of focus. The clearest evidence can be seen in the relative performance of the Japanese stock market.

...The second reason for the Abe government’s new-found tolerance for an economic slowdown is directly connected to the rise of China. When Abe was elected in late 2012, his determination to revive the Japanese economy was significantly motivated by fears about China.

The worry was not that China had overtaken Japan as the world’s second-biggest economy and would eventually overtake the United States’ — even the most ardent Japanese nationalists see both these trends as inevitable. More troubling was growing evidence that China’s economic might was shifting the balance of interest in Washington from the traditional postwar friendship with Japan to cultivating better relations with China.

Given Japan’s dependence on U.S. military power, the shift of U.S. attention to China was alarming. Particularly to a fervent nationalist such as Abe, who has always cared passionately about winning Japan’s territorial disputes and rehabilitating its wartime reputation.

But with Obama’s words, the United States has now shown its willingness to antagonize China by promising to defend Japan unconditionally in any territorial disputes. These promises will almost certainly prove false in the event of a genuine military confrontation. But for the moment, they seem to have reassured Japanese politicians that Washington will continue to pay attention to Japan — even if it slides back into economic irrelevance.

(Full article at the link)

Japan's Nikkei Shinbun's article on April 29, 2014 by Nikkei's Washington Bureau is right on, which surprises me that they actually get it.

It would be an easy task, if he could do a favor to Japan with words only and receive a substantive gain in Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) in return. It makes one wonder, given Mr. Obama's words and deeds without gravity as symbolized (represented) by his handling of Syria.

Mr. Obama was all ready to go to war with Syria (backed by nuclear Russia) with youtube videos as evidence. Who needs gravity in this day and age?

"DOE has also buried more concentrated plutonium wastes in WIPP, by blending them down to less than 10 percent plutonium with a mysterious substance called “termination of safeguards material” or, more colloquially, “stardust.”

"termination of safeguards", not quite sure which way that euphemism is headed, right?

" .. on the nation's nuclear future frequently references the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant and that project's close ties to the community," "How appropriate, then, that a high-caliber summit take place in Carlsbad, the birthplace of the model for community consent."

“In 2013, all of the real inspections of the containers at all the generating sites were stopped,” Don Hancock, director of the Nuclear Waste Safety program and an administrator at the Southwest Research and Information Center in Albuquerque, said recently. “So almost for the last year, there hasn’t been a requirement for shipments to WIPP to have more than paperwork for the containers.”

The Environment Department said at the time that the change did not weaken safety requirements for the containers."

Japan is systematically undoing apologies? I don't even know what that means. Political jockeying with your neighbors and rivals is hardly a "far east asian" phenomenon.Maybe the west could try leading by example, and learn to get along with its nemeses?

"Japan is systematically undoing apologies?" Yes. Issuing some sort of verbal exudation for the moment only, with full intention of undoing the exuding in the next available moment. And yes, certainly not limited to the Far East, only.

"Maybe the west could try leading by example, and learn to get along with its nemeses?" Now that is like a bolt-from-the-blue, of Ignorance, that is.The only nemesis at play on the international stage is each nation's so-called "Intelligence" agencies performing its nemesis-function upon its own nation's people.

So let's return your hand of cards to the table surface: same as only the befuddled-with-a-will could not have seen that Japan's codes were broken in the 2nd world war, only the befuddled would believe that the world's people do not identify the "nemeses" accurately, and daily.

About my coverage of Japan Earthquake of March 11

I am Japanese, and I not only read Japanese news sources for information on earthquake and the Fukushima Nuke Plant but also watch press conferences via the Internet when I can and summarize my findings, adding my observations.

About This Site

Well, this was, until March 11, 2011. Now it is taken over by the events in Japan, first earthquake and tsunami but quickly by the nuke reactor accident. It continues to be a one-person (me) blog, and I haven't even managed to update the sidebars after 5 months... Thanks for coming, spread the word.------------------This is an aggregator site of blogs coming out of SKF (double-short financials ETF) message board at Yahoo.

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